


It's Never Too Late

by Dogsled



Category: due South
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Male Character, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Growing Old, Heartache, M/M, Not Really Character Death, Pining, Reunions, Same-Sex Marriage, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 13:32:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13032198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dogsled/pseuds/Dogsled
Summary: On the day of Constable Fraser's funeral Ray Kowalski visits to pay his respects. But he's not really here for the Mountie they're putting in the ground, rather for the grieving husband waiting at the graveside, his white hair visible in wisps beneath the brim of his Stetson.





	It's Never Too Late

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feroxargentea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/gifts).



> feroxargentea asked for pining and grey/white haired Fraser/RayK, so here it is! I really hope you like it, and I hope you'll forgive me for killing Fraser's husband so that Fraser/RayK can happen <.< I'm sure it was a totally noble in the line of duty sort of death.

The funeral was mostly quiet. Well, apart from the salute, anyway. Gunshots echoed off the surrounding mountains, loud over the buzz of cars on the highway beneath the hill. A lone shape, a single mourner, moved away from the rank and file of other RCMP officers and laid a single rose on the casket. As he stood away the casket descended into the frozen earth, leaving the surrounding officers to stare into a pit of certain, inevitable death, for some sooner than others.

 

Constable Fraser was being put to rest today.

 

Standing on his own under a tree with his hands shoved deep into his pockets to keep warm, Ray watched the casket disappear into the ground. It didn’t hold his interest. The mourner, though, with silver grey hair visible underneath his broad rimmed Stetson, drew him like a moth to the flame. 

 

This was why he was here. A man was burying his husband, and for one horrible second when Ray had read the obituary in the Chicago Tribune, he’d thought for sure it was his friend being put in the ground.

 

Not so.

 

It had been so long, but Benton Fraser still looked beautiful. His face was soft and round where Ray’s had taken every single hint of age and doubled down on it. Lines carved his own aged face like L rail cutting across Chicago streets. It was just as badly cared for.

 

But Fraser? You’d think that the Canadian winters would have been harder on him. Even in mourning Fraser was gorgeous, and ultimately that was why Ray was here: as a well-wisher, or as support.  Or whatever it was people were supposed to be at funerals of spouses. Yet the moment that Fraser looked his way, Ray felt the urge to bolt.

 

It had been too long. Why had he thought he could do this? Facing down Fraser like this was no easier than his breakup with Stella had been, but there were twenty years between himself and Fraser. It shouldn’t have made it harder. Time should have made it less painful. 

 

These twenty years, though, had passed in self-imposed misery. Fraser had sent a Christmas card every year. Ray had never sent one back, claiming that he didn’t have a reliable address. Twenty unanswered Christmas cards, then; that was as much correspondence as they’d engaged in over all that time, yet here he was showing up uninvited out of nowhere. God, he felt like the wolf at the door, salivating over the possibility of hooking up with the grieving widow. Was that who he wanted to be?

 

Consequently, at the very same moment that Fraser locked eyes on him, Ray decided he didn’t really want to be there.

 

Maybe if he was lucky, Fraser wouldn’t recognize him. Yeah. Ray looked old and line-y enough that even Fraser, with his x-ray vision, couldn’t see through the death mask that had become his face. He was halfway across the graveyard when Fraser grabbed him by the arm, his hand as vice like as it had been two decades ago.

 

“ _Ray._ ”

 

Reluctantly, Ray turned back to face him, already feeling the excuses bubbling to the surface. He’d just happened to be passing by this funeral on the top of a hill outside of a town he’d never been to, no big deal, it wasn’t like he was here on purpose. What a funny surprise! But any excuse he might have come up with evaporated when he saw the smile on Fraser’s face.

 

“ _Ray._ It _is_ you.”

 

“Scare a guy half to death, Fraser. I was just going back to my car for my glasses.”

 

Still beaming, Fraser shook his head. “You’re _wearing_ your glasses, Ray.”

 

“Figures—“

 

Before Ray could get any more words out than that he was enveloped in an enormous hug.  Strong Mountie arms wrapped around him, Fraser burying his head so hard into his neck that his hat rolled off the back of his head and tumbled to the ground.

 

“It’s good to see you, Ray. Especially today.”

 

“Yeah, well. That’s what buddies do, right?”

 

“You didn’t get the wedding invitation?”

 

Ray was quiet. He held Fraser’s gaze for long, awful seconds then found himself desperately looking away, hurriedly blinking back tears. “You know me and nuptials, Fraser. I swore no more weddings after Stella’s.”

 

The truth was Ray threw out wedding invitations the second he got them these days, couldn’t deal with the fact that other people in his life were moving on when he felt like he was standing still. Different precinct but same job—sharing the roster with assholes like Voigt, for God’s sake.

 

“Ray, you…”

 

Whatever Fraser had been about to say he stopped himself, instead falling quiet again. There were old wounds still unspoken between them, but Ray imagined he could see them painted in the air even though Fraser fell quiet.

 

_Why didn’t you write back? Why are you here? Why even bother to pretend I matter to you? Did you come here to laugh? Is this a joke to you?_

 

“I didn’t honestly think you meant it,” Ray finally said, and wished instantly that he hadn’t.

 

“What?”

 

Ray swallowed, working his throat anxiously for a moment. It wasn’t like he had managed to speak about it last time, or in the thousands of days that had passed since then. He hadn’t even managed to parse it to himself out loud, as though he could work through the anxious energy that had come from the tumultuous final hours of their trip north. He’d not had the chance to work through his feelings while crouched in a grotty mausoleum, spilling the beans to old ladies, gun runners, and a stand-in Mountie therapist. No, this time he’d been stuck with his guilt, his fears – all of it – with nobody to talk to, and whose fault was that?

 

Admittedly, the only person he’d wanted to talk to about it was the one person he couldn’t, and so here he was blurting it out after twenty years, like seeing Fraser had popped the cap off a bottle that had been shaken for two decades without release.

 

“You know what, Fraser. I thought it was… I thought, you know, that it was a spur of the moment thing. And you said to me, you said sometimes when two fellas are alone for a long time in harsh environments, risking their lives together, sometimes they just have to express their feelings in certain ways, _but it didn’t have to mean anything_.”

 

“So you thought that I didn’t mean it,” Fraser said, grimly.

 

“And then you go and marry some _guy_ , so you _obviously_ fucking mean it. I mean for God’s sake, Fraser…”

 

“Have you considered for a moment how it felt to me?”

 

Ray stared at him dumbly, feeling more like an idiot by the moment. Of course he hadn’t. That wasn’t the objective of the exercise of navel-gazing, after all. “What?”

 

“You _rejected me_ , Ray. My relationships…ever since Victoria, they all ended with a kiss. I felt like I was unworthy of anything else, particularly since I was sure that when we left together you understood my intentions.” Ray had never heard Fraser falter like this. Even searching back through his memories he could barely remember a time when such raw emotion sounded in the tone of his voice. If twenty years had made Ray more bitter, it had clearly made Fraser softer, with more of a handhold on his own feelings. Or maybe he’d just been thinking about saying all of this for a very long time.

 

“But you…you seemed disgusted,” he continued, “and when you didn’t write to me it felt like I’d lost my best friend all over again.”

 

Ray stared at him. He hadn’t even considered that, but it was so obvious now, the hurt he’d done, the pain he’d brought Fraser just because they hadn’t talked about what had happened in all the years since. One misunderstanding about intentions, all because Ray never loved _anything_ without meaning it heart and soul, and they’d parted ways for far too long.

 

But here they stood; the loneliest cop and the widower.

 

“Michael loved me,” Fraser finally murmured, after crouching to recover his hat, wringing the brim with his fingers in a self-conscious way that Ray found heartbreakingly beautiful. Years of happiness tinged with the grief of recent loss flickered across Fraser’s expression, shone from blue eyes which had paled with age. “I was so fortunate to have him in my life for so long.”

 

Ray grimaced. The lost opportunities flashed behind his eyes again, imagining the content life they must have had, Fraser and his Mountie husband, sharing their Canadian jokes with each other and rolling naked in the snow and whatever the hell else people got up to when they lived with Fraser full time. They must have been so happy, and here Ray was interfering with that, appearing at the worst possible moment to fill Fraser with even more grief, this time over their abandoned partnership.

 

So much for red and green ships, right?

 

Ray knew one thing, though: _he’d missed him_. There was a world of lost opportunities in their past that he would never know, only regret; years that he would never get back; meals they’d never share; dances they’d never dance; songs he’d never have to pretend he didn’t like Fraser singing. They’d lost out on a wealth of experiences, which was more devastating still because clearly neither of them had ever really wanted to let each other go. The few years they’d had together had been _incredible_ , and thinking of how rich their lives could have been if they’d spent twenty more years together, instead of apart, filled Ray with despair.

 

He was still struggling with his loss when Fraser slid his glasses off his nose, his tough surprisingly intimate. Ray’s eyes were so bad these days that he couldn’t see without them, except for extremely close, but fortunately for him Fraser was _right there_ , almost nose to nose with him.

 

“H-ey,” Ray stuttered. “Isn’t it your husband’s funeral? Shouldn’t we pay a little respect…”

 

Fraser shook his head. “We were always very honest with each other, Ray. Michael would want me to be happy—“ 

 

To Ray’s stunned surprise – though not much considering how close Fraser had gotten to him – warm, soft lips closed against his own, drawing out a slow tattoo of a kiss against his mouth. It was an experienced kiss, and Ray couldn’t help but feel like some kind of inept fool, for Fraser had clearly been kissing every day of his life for the last decade while Ray felt like a dried-up husk of broken love. Where Fraser had moved on, Ray had stewed – because stewing, frankly, was what he did best – and he was terrified that it showed in his kiss.

 

But when Fraser’s tongue tangled persistently with his own, Ray felt his confidence inching back in, returning the kiss cautiously and then more confidently, and finding his efforts mirrored and encouraged by Fraser. It felt like the first time all over again, so very much so that when he pulled back breathless Ray expected to be standing in three feet of snow again, wrapped up in far too many layers, his giant mittens keeping him from grabbing Fraser’s face and kissing him again.

 

If wishes were horses, then that was what he would have wanted: to go back in time and do it all over again, to start from that kiss and never let Fraser go.

 

But they still stood in the graveyard, and Fraser’s hair was white, and Ray wore his age on his skin, and they stared through decades into each other’s faces and smiled as though they were young anyway.

 

And Fraser slid Ray’s glasses back onto his nose and took his hand, squeezed it, repositioned his Stetson on his head with his other hand, and said “Your place or mine?”

 

Ray just shook his head. “How about neither? It’s never too late for a new adventure, Fraser.”


End file.
